Mr. Jerry Grant:

If one does not have individual meters, the process by which excess water use in a domestic house could be located would be through sending operators around the district meter area with sounding sticks to find the leaks. I will put that in context.

We have almost 900,000 meters - 893,000 to be precise - and each reader in a car can read 80,000 meters over two months each quarter. On the basis of current statistics, that will turn up roughly 5,000 to 6,000 leaks. If we were to try to do that with operators with sounding sticks, identifying, locating, contacting and so on, we obviously would not get anywhere close to that figure. In terms of the efficiency of identifying leaks in properties, there is no comparison. The reality of normal leak detection is one would want one's operators to be primarily finding leaks on the public system, which is where the great bulk of leakage exists.